The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [134]
As a final contrast, it’s interesting to think of Led Zeppelin, which had the same dark and semi-satanic brooding, and the same sex, drugs, and so on, and even the same debt to the blues aesthetic and the deal at the cross-roads, but not the riots. It’s true that Zeppelin missed the historical window by a couple of years, but apart from timing I see no reason why Zeppelin couldn’t have ended up with the albatross of Altamont just as easily as The Stones. And surely Robert Plant had the needed testosterone to do what Mick did to the girls. So maybe it was just the times and not the Stones? We’ll never know for sure. With that much said, there’s no question at all that the Stones pushed us past the line between light and dark, when it comes to building up collective emotion. Their sex is androgynous and forbidden, their drugs kill, and their rock and roll … well, all I can say is I like it.
Gimme that Old Time Religion?
It isn’t quite accurate to say that the collective frenzy has a “long history” because in fact, it’s older than history. Stuff that old is a little bit tough to know about, so you’re onto some slippery back roads of human thought when you decide to think about it—can’t tell what people are making up from what really happened. It’s like listening to a Republican administration. The vagaries of pre-history make it especially dicey for philosophers to discuss, since we never cared too much for facts anyway, and most respectable philosophers would tell you that there was no philosophy back then, just irrational failures of thinking. I disagree with that, and I’m not interested in being a respectable philosopher, but I agree it’s pretty hard to say what philosophy amounts to back before writing was invented. Still, even respectable philosophers need only a little encouragement and they’re off into their own land of the (conceptually) lost.
The problem of the frenzy showed up early on, even in philosophy, and it has re-appeared in turns from then to now, but we should deal with it more than we do. Socrates himself was an initiate of the “Eleusinian Mysteries,” which involved fertility rites and perhaps some ritual orgies. There were no human sacrifices by that time in (recorded) Mediterranean history. But even at that, the early philosophers found the sex rituals and the crowd hysteria objectionable. Plato wrote about the problem of eros and how it makes human beings mad with passion, like when Keith said those girls were “beyond what they wanted to be.” Plato wasn’t much in favor of that sort of behavior, and he used his power as a writer to absolve his teacher Socrates of any real loss of rational control in the Symposium. Plato was pretty dedicated to downplaying Socrates’s religious leanings (this frenzy was “religion” back then). We’ll never know for sure if Socrates got his rocks off at the rites. So Plato sort of got what he wanted, I guess.
By the time people like Plato and Socrates lived, the fourth century B.C.E., the Dionysian festivals were coming into poor repute. It was a time of transition, and Plato definitely opposed the old ways of the flesh, and he didn’t like The Rolling Stones (they were around back then, as I will explain, they just didn’t have a record deal). Plato even claimed Socrates never got drunk, no matter how much wine you gave him. I actually know a woman who’s like that, so I’m sure the phenomenon exists, but I just don’t think that is the real Socrates. Plato also wrote about how certain kinds of music (such as blues and rock) ignite human desires and lead us to weakness and “effeminacy” (that’s what it’s called in the translations). Manliness and rationality in all circumstances were associated with self-restraint by Plato, and after he’d had his say, if you still did the old rites, you were just a wimp in the thrall of women. Plato didn’t want people like that around and advocated banning their favorite music. In short: no Stones concert allowed in Plato’s city. Plato wanted the women to be like men, not the other way around.
I’ve Been